The woman’s forefinger thrust to the center of the Nazarene’s chest.
“You who would sever Jew from Jew. You who would subvert the soul of Israel with your madness of ‘the kingdom of God’ and your rejection of all that the prophets have given us down three thousand years of exile and suffering. What is Israel? It is that lore, those agonies, that history. You would replace it with what? Your make-believe ‘messiah’ and his teachings of the barnyard?”
The Nazarene made to shove the witch away. She pressed with even greater vigor upon him. David sprang to the man’s side, drawing his dagger to defend him.
The witch belted the youth across the face.
Before any could react, the woman had snatched the dagger. With the speed of a striking snake, she leapt at Michael. In an instant the woman had torn the Nazarene’s robes open and thrust her blade toward his exposed belly.
“Yes!” cried the witch. “This is zeal!”
Telamon advanced upon her, gladius drawn.
“Back!” barked the woman. “Or I’ll gut him this instant.”
The sorceress’s blade poised fractions apart from Michael’s loins.
“We will see the letter now! I will carve it out of him!”
Telamon’s glance swung to David, then to the child. The girl’s eyes were molten with anguish. She seemed upon the instant of flinging her own flesh onto the witch’s blade to spare her father.
Michael saw this. “Hold, child! I am ready to die.”
The moment hung, terrible with dread. The witch, it was clear, was ablaze with passion to eviscerate the Nazarene. At the same time Telamon’s sword loomed, an instant apart from taking her off at the neck.
The mercenary’s voice broke the standoff.
“Go ahead, split the man’s guts,” he said. “But you won’t find the letter.”
The man-at-arms relaxed his sword hand, just slightly.
He took half a step back.
“Your friends the Zealots knew where the letter was. You saw how they struck, deliberately and with unified intent.”
“What are you talking about?”
“But they didn’t go after the Nazarene, did they?”
The sorceress’s glance shot to Telamon. What is this? her eyes seemed to say. Some kind of trick?
With his blade Telamon indicated the nearest of the slain Zealots. “This one could have cut Michael down right here. But he sprinted past without attempting a blow, didn’t he?”
The mercenary gestured to the corpse of a second attacker.
“This one never even glanced at the Nazarene. That pair, the same. They went after the girl. They all did. Why? Because they knew something we don’t. From where or whom, I have no idea. Some source in Alexandria? The Sanhedrin? An informer attached to the Apostle?”
The sorceress seized Michael even more forcefully with her free hand. She thrust her blade a hairbreadth into the Nazarene’s flesh, enough to draw blood and make the man jerk back involuntarily.
From the folds of his robe Telamon withdrew a clay pot shard—the one upon which, back at the Anthill, the child had scrawled a word.
Telamon tossed this onto the ground between the witch and Michael.
PHILOS
“What are you saying, peregrine? That this urchin carries the letter?”
The mercenary’s glance swung first to the child, then to the Nazarene.
“A girl who cannot speak,” he said, “and a man who will not. What better pair to conceal an earthshaking secret from an empire?”
The witch’s blade withdrew, just a little, from Michael’s belly.
Telamon advanced a half step toward her.
“You saw the letter in prison,” he said. “You told me you saw it in the child’s hands.”
The sorceress’s expression confirmed this.
“The girl can read. She read the letter and committed it to memory. Then she, or her father, destroyed it.”
The witch’s eyes swung to the child. “This guttersnipe? This feral rat?”
“She carries the letter now. Here. Between her ears.” Telamon tapped his skull. “When she reaches the community at Corinth, if she does, she’ll scribe it out word for word.”
Telamon again indicated the bodies of the Zealot attackers. “Somehow your Zealot friends knew this or guessed it. The Roman lieutenant did too, at the chasm, when he tried to get us to hand over the child.”
The sorceress turned to Michael, then to the girl.
The pair’s expressions, despite themselves, confirmed Telamon’s supposition.
The man-at-arms took the final step toward the sorceress.
He held out his hand.
Into this the witch set the hilt of the dagger.
“There is no letter,” said Telamon. “The girl is the letter.”
BOOK SEVEN
TO THE NILE
− 23 −
IN A BOTTLE
“WHEN DID YOU KNOW?”
This from Michael, addressing Telamon. The hour was the Roman third watch, lacking two hours till dawn. The man-at-arms had set the Nazarene upon the back of the stronger of the two mules. The mercenary, trekking afoot, led this beast into the teeth of a gale against which he and the others advanced with strenuous difficulty, muffled to the eyeballs.
“You knew before the Zealot attack, didn’t you?”
Telamon refused to engage Michael in such converse. He insisted only that the Nazarene confirm himself fit to ride. The mercenary pointed north to a jagged ridge a few miles ahead. “Can you carry on? We must reach the summit before sunrise.”
“You knew before then, even,” said Michael. “At the chasm. No, earlier still . . . the Anthill. You knew when the child scribed a word upon the pot shard.”
The party had tramped two days from the site of the attack of the Zelotoi. Its configuration had altered however. The girl rode now, beside Michael and the man-at-arms, on the fastest of the mounts recovered of the Zealots. She was armed, with the X dagger Telamon had given her at the chasm and then taken back. The mercenary has set this weapon into her hand at the same time he boosted her into the saddle of the lead Zealot’s horse.
The sorceress now straggled at the rear of the column, afoot, wrists bound, being pulled behind the last pony. The mercenary staked her to the earth again each night, after her collection mandated by him to sustain and accelerate the Nazarene’s recovery. A watch was set over the woman throughout each night, manned in addition to Telamon and David by the child.
The witch had lost none of her fervor for invective. “So now I am the one you imprison! To what end, mercenary? Do you imagine the next company of pursuers will spare you because you hold me? Never! The Almighty will not let them, and neither will I!”
Telamon drove the party on. A fierce windstorm had gotten up in the after course of the downpour and had not abated, save for fleeting lulls in all those hours. This scourge was aggravated by a fresh affliction. Great tumbling diaspores, called by the Arabs spina and by the Romans anastatica, came barreling upon the company at ground level, driven before the gale in numbers uncountable. The animals, struck with panic by this assault of nature, bawled and brayed and could not be quietened.
“Merciful God!” cried the sorceress. “What are these things?”